Posts Tagged ‘Inquisition’

Anne Brenon is one of the foremost experts on the history and theology of the Cathars, so I took her book to re-read on my recent trip to the Aude department of southern France as I set off to visit some of the sites where they lived and were ultimately wiped out by the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It’s one in an excellent and long-running series from the publishers Gallimard, where a topic, theme or idea is explored in depth in a copiously illustrated main section, which is supported by a supplementary document and bibliography section at the end. Some of their titles were taken up and translated by Thames and Hudson a couple of decades back, but that enterprise seems to have petered out.

The Cathars formed a sizeable and widespread alternative to the official church in southern France, northern Italy and other adjoining areas; they rejected the authority of the pope, the sacraments and rituals of the Roman Church, and sought to return to the basics of early Christianity; men and women were of equal status. More seriously, they spurned the cross, the passion of Christ and the crucifixion, and focused on the Holy Spirit and Pentecost. This earned them condemnation as heretics, the launching of the crusade against the Albigensian heresy (as the Cathar beliefs were labelled) and the setting up of the Inquisition. Of course, it wasn’t just about religion: power politics were in play as always, as the French throne sought to spread its borders and emasculate a powerful rival in the Languedoc. It is a truly shameful episode in the history of the official church: the 5000 in habitants of the city of Beziers were slaughtered, heretics and Catholic alike on the orders of a bishop who said: ‘Kill them all; God will recognise his own’…

The Aude department is encouraging tourism to the areas where the Cathars lived and died; there are museums and exhibitions, and they are careful to de-mystify the untruths which have grown up over the years, that the ruined castles such as Queribus and Peyrepetuse, perched impossibly on their rocky crags, were the sites of Cathar last stands: those castles were built in those places by the French throne after the Cathars had been evicted and massacred, as part of the pacification and securing of the frontier with the throne of Aragon to the south…

Fascinating places which I really enjoyed visiting, and very interesting episode of mediaeval history. Brenon’s book was a very useful companion: there’s sufficient information to make one feel informed properly without being overloaded, it’s well-organised and illustrated.

A serious tome on mediaeval history, specifically the Albigensian Crusade. For a long time, I’ve been interested in the Cathars and their castles in the Languedoc, but it’s taken me a while to get round to reading this book.

In the late twelfth/ early thirteenth centuries the established Church was widely viewed as corrupt, and worldly, and a serious rival developed, the Cathar church, which came to command the loyalty of the entire region. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about its beliefs, practices and organisation, as it was ruthlessly and totally destroyed, and the subsequent accounts were written by the victors.

The broader context was the development and enlargement of the kingdom of France, which meant the annexation of the Languedoc by whatever means. There were also petty rivalries between local lords and barons, and the thrones of England and Spain, and the Empire as well as the Papacy all wanting to advance their power and influence.

The Church realised it needed to extirpate its rival; at first it used its power and influence over the temporal authorities, with great brutality; then it invented the independent Inquisition with powers to seek out and destroy heresy, arranging for it basically to have carte blanche from the local powers to do what it liked, an arrangement that suited both sides.

I think what I found most shocking was what I can only describe as the Stalinist methods of the Church and the Inquisition to deal with heresy and heretics. A climate of insecurity and terror was created throughout the entire region, and this led people to denounce themselves and friends and neighbours in a bid to avoid more serious consequences; the idea that the Inquisition would keep to its side of any bargain was unlikely. Heretics – men and women, young and old were often collectively burned in dozens and sometimes hundreds because they refused to abjure their Cathar faith, and eventually the old religion disappeared.

Oldenbourg’s account is masterly; some apparently think she was too sympathetic to the Cathars, but when you read her account, the established Church clearly loses any moral or spiritual authority from the very outset; although the Cathars were a rival church, all they sought was to be allowed to worship as they wished. There is an enormous amount of detail, distilled from available Inquisition documents and other sources; all is referenced. She explains in full and clear detail, as far as is possible, the beliefs and attitudes of the time so that her whole history is fully contextualised. She is open about the difficulty of coming at the truth; she is clear that in the end the issue was the independence or not of the Languedoc, and that the Church would have seen itself as having no other route than to try and destroy what was a serious alternative religion across a large area and therefore a major threat to its temporal authority. All in all, I found this an excellent work.